Karen Yourish | Kat Downs Mulder

Catching up on 2012

I’ve been completely delinquent about posting here. I will try to do better, and in the meantime, here is a selection of work from the first part of the year (am going to follow this up with some breakout posts on specific projects).

What’s at stake on Super Tuesday?
Going way back to Super Tuesday, we published this really fun motion graphic featuring Chris Cillizza and the delegate mountain that Todd Lindeman and Sisi Wei built. I worked on storyboarding it with the team, a well as helping in the studio (led by AJ Chavar and Sohail Al-Jamea) and with building out the page. The project was really fun and newsy, and a great job especially by animator Sohail, and of course Chris Cillizza.

super tuesday

Rescue and Recovery
This is a really powerful piece looking at Virginia Tech five years after the massacre, through the lens of an iconic image of survivor Kevin Sterne. I did design, development, audio and wrote one of the segments of the piece. I love the simplicity and amazing story. Again, an awesome team effort with work from Ben de la Cruz, Bill O’Leary, Josh du Lac and others:

Repairing the Washington Monument
This piece about the damage to the national icon just came out last week — featuring a 3-D model by Alberto Cuadra, and reporting by Cristina Rivero. Kathryn Faulkner, the summer intern in graphics, did most of the heavy lifting on the interactive side, with me in an editing role and pitching in to help with some of the tricky parts, like the rotating model. The piece turned out beautifully:

washington monument damage

Kat Downs August 26, 2012 Multimedia, Workalbertocuadra, bendelacruz, dc, Design and infographics, infographics, Information Graphics, interactive, Karen Yourish, kathrynfaulkner, politics, sohailaljamea, vatech, washingtonpost.com, workw Read more >

Royal rumors (and some graphics fun)

With Kate and Will back in the news for the rumors about a pregnancy with twins (not true, by the way), I thought, “Hey, what better opportunity to make up for the fact that I never wrote about our royal wedding graphics on the blog?” So here I am. Royal couple junkies, enjoy. And if you’re a true royal wedding fanatic, you might enjoy this video about my roommate, coincidentally also named Kate Middleton (this one is true).

The main piece I worked on was the Westminster Abbey and parade route tour. Sohail Al-Jamea and Alberto Cuadra worked together on the 3-D renderings and animations, and I layered on the interactivity and created the Google Earth flyovers and, with help from Laris Karklis, the parade route maps and Street View layers.

Continue to see how we made the interactive parade route, and how we created 3 types of javascript quizzes »

Kat Downs September 18, 2011 Multimedia3-D, features, fun, games, google earth, google street view, Karen Yourish, laura stanton, motion graphics, royal wedding, The Washington Post Read more >

Analyzing the U.S. tax code, break by break, and other recent charts

Today, we came out with a new graphic that looks at the tax breaks on the books this year. It is part of Running in the Red, a series the Post has been running for the past few months, and accompanied Lori Montgomery’s front-page story, “Ever-increasing tax breaks for U.S. families eclipse benefits for special interests,” a great story that explains spending through the tax code.

The graphic is all CSS and JavaScript. With charts that only have bars, it’s simple to dynamically add sized divs with background colors that create charts. The data will update automatically if necessary and it works across all browsers and mobile platforms with no workarounds:

And has details for each of the 172 breaks currently active (see below). Added bonus: I learned a ton about the tax code.

And a couple more (relatively) recent charts:

This one I worked on with Alicia Parlapiano and Neil Irwin. Because I wanted to create animate transitions and interactivity, I used Flash to create this graphic. It has detailed drilldowns to look at employment in each sector of the economy. I tried to inject more annotation into this graphic (and the taxes one above) than we have done in the past with data-driven graphics. Instead of throwing a bunch of data out there, we’re providing more context and guided views — by category and by sector versus a completely self-guided data dive.

This was a fun chart I helped our intern, Heather Billings, with at the beginning of the summer. We used flot to make these charts showing how the lead changed between the Heat and the Mavericks during the NBA finals. This was particularly fun for me because I got really into the NBA finals this year and watched every game. I know, hard to believe, but true. I was a having a great time analyzing the outcome of the games and reading all the news — and if you missed it, this was a great article from Bill Simmons at Grantland.

And another one about when and if China’s economy will pass the United States to become the world’s largest.

Kat Downs September 18, 2011 Information Graphicsalicia parlapiano, basketball, charts, css, Design and infographics, heather billings, infographics, javascript, Karen Yourish, laura stanton, nba, politics, sports, taxes, The Washington Post, unemployment, Work Read more >

A look at the life of an alleged spy

The spy next door?

Last week, after the news broke that one of the 10 alleged Russian spies arrested by the FBI most recently lived and worked in Arlington, Va., Ben de la Cruz came up with the idea to do some panos of the scenes where the alleged spy lived his life. We talked through how we’d like to present it and how the story would flow through the audio and panos. Then Ben worked with Alex Garcia to shoot and stitch the panos and he wrote and recorded the narration. I put together the piece in a slideshow format, with audio and a pano for each location on the map. It took about 6 hours of my time to put together. It’s a nice little piece that’s a window into the life of a spy — something we’re all very curious about.

Kat Downs July 6, 2010 MultimediaAlex Garcia, audio, Ben de la Cruz, Karen Yourish, Panoramas, The Washington Post, Work Read more >

2010 Political Race Maps: House, Senate and Governors

These three new race maps (house, senate, and governors) launched today with the new PostPolitics section of The Washington Post. I worked with Karen Yourish and Dan Keating, who are absolutely amazing data whizzes, to get the data together for the project, and Nathaniel Vaughn Kelso gave me some great base maps to start with. We really wanted to give a complete picture of the 2010 races, so we have current race ratings (for house, we have state of the race), election history for each district or state, and demographic information that lets you see some cool patterns — like how states vote when they have a high percentage of seniors or high poverty rates. Keep reading this post »

Kat Downs April 28, 2010 MapsDan Keating, Design and infographics, elections, graphics, interactive, Karen Yourish, Maps, Nathaniel Vaughn Kelso, politics, The Washington Post, Work Read more >

The Politics of the Prize

I created this graphic about controversial winners in Nobel Peace Prize history based off of some of the development work I’d done for the helicopters project. The timeline and slideshow componenets are very similar, I just switched the look of the slideshow portion and made the timeline interact with the slideshow.

Timeline: Politics of the Prize

Reusing the classes I’d created saved a lot of time — it only took a few hours to create this piece. With the improvements we could have a 15-minute turnaround on future projects.

Kat Downs October 10, 2009 Design and infographics, WorkFlash, Information Graphics, Karen Yourish, The Washington Post, timeline Read more >

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